Blogger Templates

With the recent update of the original free HTML template that Hawaii is based on I thought I'd add the extra colorsets to my Blogger Template list.

Two versions of this template have been produced, the original content-sidebar-sidebar layout, and the sidebar-content-sidebar layout that a few Bloggers seem to prefer. The images have been uploaded to ImageShack so most Bloggers will only need to download the template files, but if you do need to host the images yourself, the zipfile for Hawaii has been updated to include all four versions of this great template and all the images.

As an interesting aside, the Elvis Presley film Blue Hawaii from 1961 which also stars Joan Blackman is one of my all time favorite films. I know it's a bit old now but it's good fun with a great soundtrack.

I love background images on navbars, they make an everyday ordinary navbar look quite special, just look at my orange navbar. Pixabella put together a few extra navbar images for the Hawaii template so that users could change the colors and overall look of this wonderful Blogger theme.

If you'd like to use one of these new images in your Blogger theme simply upload the new image to a service such as ImageShack or your Blogger account in a draft blog entry, then change the URL of the navbar image in your template CSS. You'll find three separate lines that need to be changed within the Navigation section. Look for #navigation, #navigation #navbar_link a:hover, and .first a

I've made a substantial update to the Hawaii template, and it now includes two variants, the original content-sidebar-sidebar layout, and an additional sidebar-content-sidebar layout. View the demo

The Hawaii template is also being ported to Serendipity, and may get ported to Wordpress, unless someone else beats me to it - anyone up for the challenge?

So getting back to Blogger, the Hawaii template updates include better support for ordered and unordered lists, more accessible font sizes, all links now showing in blue with an orange hover, and built-in resizing to fit within Blogger's edit widgets screen instead of breaking outside the iframe (mostly a problem in Firefox).

The only part of the template that needs to be edited for your own needs is the navigation bar, and to do this simply select the 'Edit HTML' screen and find

<li><a href="#">About Me</a></li>

Change the # sign to the URL of the link you want to use, and the About Me text to something more meaningful for your needs.

As per usual, download Hawaii XML Blogger template using the text file hawaii-3col-xml-blogger.txt or hawaii zipfile if you want to host the images somewhere else.

Introducing my latest Blogger XML template, Hawaii, so named because of the bright colors and flower print in the header. The design was produced using Inkscape by Pixabella. You can see my demo blog with the Hawaii blogger template.

I plan to produce other versions of this template, with the columns changed, and maybe a different color header image, so let me know in the comments what you're looking for. The sidebars in Hawaii are 180px wide so should be able to handle most sidebar widgets or advertising.

The only part of the template that needs to be edited for your own needs is the navigation bar, and to do this simply select the 'Edit HTML' screen and find

<li><a href="#">About Me</a></li>

Change the # sign to the URL of the link you want to use, and the About Me text to something more meaningful for your needs.

As per usual, download Hawaii XML Blogger template using the text file hawaii-3col-xml-blogger.txt or hawaii zipfile if you want to host the images somewhere else.

I finally updated Andreas Viklund's 1024px template for Blogger XML, and while I was doing it I also added the ability to change the color of all elements on page. Don't like the default color blue, no problem, change it using Blogger's Fonts and Colors screen. See the 1024px blogger template demo.

The original 1024px Classic Blogger template is still available, but I think most users now want the XML version.

The XML version still has one element that can only be changed by editing the HTML, this is the two words 'Your Name' in the footer. I think in the future it might be possible to automatically update this by using the Blogger's profile name or site name, but I haven't experimented with this yet and I figure making the change yourself isn't that difficult really, and it's good practice working with HTML.

So, select 'edit HTML' inside your Blogger dashboard, and scroll to the very bottom of the template file. About half a dozen lines up you will see the text 'Your Name'. Change this and save your template.

To get your copy of the XML template, either download the text file, or the zipfile which includes the background image so that you can host this on your own account.

I'm very excited to announce that I've updated our popular ceejay01 template to Blogger XML standard. It's taken me a while to get my head around the XML code, and anyone who has tried this will know there isn't a lot of information to work from, so it feels like an achievement.

ceejay01 has proven to be one of our most popular templates and is used on many hundreds of blogs. By updating to Blogger XML users get the ability to add widgets to the sidebar without having to know any HTML. However, there are still two parts of the template that need editing by users.

The first is the link bar at the top right of the template. These unfortunately need to be edited by hand, so you'll need to open the template in Blogger's Edit HTML screen, and scroll down until you find the line below, then just change the # sign into the full URL of your link and change the word 'Link' to something more descriptive.

<li><a href='#'>Link1</a></li>

The second part of the template that still needs to be edited by hand is the about me box, and following the same approach from above, look for;

<div id='about-snippet'>
<p>Welcome to my site, please bookmark this page.</p>
</div>

You should only change the text that I've underlined, which will look normal on your version.

To download the XML version of ceejay01, two options are available, download the text only version, or my zipfile which also includes the images - just in case you want to host them yourself.